Searching for Risk, page 13
“I miss Alfie,” Veronica murmured, speaking up for the first time all session.
Donovan had to admit he missed the little guy, too. Dr. Firestone’s psychic Papillon, with his butterfly ears and psychedelic bowties, had always been a great comfort during these sessions. Alfie always knew who most needed some snuggle therapy, which made the heavier stuff easier to discuss. He definitely could’ve used some Alfie comfort during the last session. Maybe then he wouldn’t have let his temper get the best of him.
“I’m working on finding us a more permanent meeting spot that allows all the dogs and not just Zelda,” Dr. Firestone said. “But until then, we have to respect the health code here—”
“Uh… hey, guys?” Rose cracked the door open and poked her head in. “Sorry to interrupt, but you might want to see this.”
Donovan’s stomach dropped like he was on the first hill of a rollercoaster, but there was no corresponding rush of adrenaline to make the feeling better. It was all dread.
They got up and followed Rose out to the bar, where she picked up a remote and increased the volume on one of the TVs.
“Breaking news this afternoon, as authorities have discovered a body in the woods near the town of Steam Valley. The body is believed to be that of missing eighteen-year-old Darcy Cantrell, who disappeared in 2007. However, an autopsy and DNA testing will be required to confirm the identity of the remains. According to sources, firefighters found the body in the ashes left by the devastating Double R Fire, which could make identification more difficult.”
They showed the picture of Darcy that had been used time and again since her disappearance—a school photo of a smirking girl with dyed-black hair and flat eyes lined in heavy black makeup. It looked like a mugshot, and it wasn’t the real Darcy. It didn’t show her wicked sense of humor or the big heart and bravery that compelled her to stand- up for the outcasts.
“Darcy Cantrell’s disappearance has been the subject of a popular ongoing podcast,” the anchor continued, “and a vocal group of fans recently started an online petition demanding answers as to why investigators’ main suspect, Donovan Scott, remains at large. While it is too soon to say what led to Miss Cantrell’s disappearance and possible death, this discovery is a tragic development for a community already devastated by the wildfire—”
“Turn it off,” Donovan said and sank into a chair at one of the high-top tables. He scrubbed his hands over his head. “Fuck.”
“What can we do?” Sawyer asked.
Donovan lifted his head to stare at the three men. Veronica, as usual, had hung back and still hovered by the door to the back room. “Does anyone have a time machine?”
“If I did, I wouldn’t be stuck using sign language to communicate,” Pierce signed.
“And I wouldn’t be blind,” Sawyer said.
Zak stared pointedly down at his metal leg.
“Yeah, okay, I get it.” Donovan chuckled, but there was no humor in it. “Fresh out of time machines.”
“What if we investigate ourselves?” Zak suggested. “Our tactical K9 program is on hold until the rescue is rebuilt, so we have nothing but time on our hands and we have the skills. Pierce and I could poke around town while Sawyer does some research online—”
“I do love internet sleuthing,” Sawyer said.
Zak gestured toward him in a sweeping motion, a nonverbal, “See?”
Donovan held up his hands. “Slow down, Uno. How is poking around town and reading a bunch of true crime blogs gonna help? And Ash won’t like it.”
“Fuck Ash. What?” Zak asked when everyone just stared at him. “He’s my brother-in-law. I’m allowed to call him out when he’s being a jackass. We were all friends once—hell, basically brothers—but I haven’t seen him doing jack-shit to help clear your name.”
“Because,” Ash said with barely restrained patience as he pushed through the front door of the pub, “my job isn’t to clear his name. It’s to find the truth.”
Rose scoffed and gave up on wiping down the bar. “Yeah, okay.”
“Do you have a problem with me?” Ash snapped, which surprised the hell out of Donovan. He glanced at Zak, who whistled softly and backed up a step, hands raised as if to say, “Nope, I’m staying out of this.”
Ash was usually a stoic man, quiet and shuttered, communicating mainly in grunts—unless it was with his sister. Anna was the only one who could get under that hard outer shell he’d built around himself. Except, apparently, Rose Galasso could, too, because Ash was simmering with aggravation now as he planted his feet, crossed his arms, and faced off with her. He looked rougher than he had when Donovan saw him earlier in the week, with his hair sticking up from multiple agitated passes of a hand and heavy shadows darkening his eyes. The fire and investigation were getting to him, fraying his nerves.
Someone needed to slow him down before he self-destructed.
“Yeah, you know, I do have a problem with you, Sheriff.” Rose slung the towel over her shoulder and planted her hands on her hips. “You talk all high and mighty about truth, but the sheriff’s department doesn’t exactly have a stellar reputation when it comes to finding the truth, especially when dealing with society’s most marginalized people.”
“Maybe that was true under the last administration,” Ash admitted, though it seemed to pain him to do so. “But I’m going to start changing things around here.”
She rolled her eyes. “Good luck with that. Do you even know this town? Have you ever actually sat down with any of the people here and asked them how they want things to change?”
“No,” he said, voice tight, his patience obviously on its last fraying thread. “I haven’t exactly had time for fireside chats.”
“Make the time.”
“Oh, sure. I’ll add it to my to-do list right after I corral the media, figure out who killed Darcy Cantrell, and protect everyone from this wildfire—which, it was just confirmed five minutes ago, was started by arson, so my list just grew exponentially longer because now I have to find a fucking arsonist. But be honest, Rose. You can’t really be too concerned with the state of our town and its marginalized people when you opened a pub here to profit off our rampant alcoholism.”
“Oh, fuck you.” She snapped the towel off her shoulder and stormed away, slamming her office door hard enough to rattle the bottles on the shelf behind the bar.
“Yikes,” Pierce signed.
“That sounded like a conversation Zelda and I want to nope out of,” Sawyer agreed and started toward the door with Zelda leading the way. “See you guys next week. Unless you do decide to investigate, then I’m in.”
Ash swung toward the remaining group, his eyes intense as a muscle twitched under his beard. “Nobody here is investigating any-fucking-thing, got it?”
Zak gave a noncommittal shrug and also walked toward the door. Pierce hesitated, then followed.
“I mean it, Hendricks!” Ash’s voice boomed after them. “We may be family now, but that won’t stop me from throwing your ass in jail for obstruction.”
“Your sister will love you for that,” Zak called back, unperturbed.
Ash groaned and pinched the bridge of his nose like he had a raging headache. “Of all the men she could’ve married…”
Dr. Firestone took the long way around Donovan but patted Ash’s arm soothingly as she passed him. “You know he just likes pushing your buttons, Sheriff. Don’t let him see how much it bugs you, and he’ll eventually stop.”
“Easier said than done, Doctor.”
“I know.” She gave a sympathetic smile as she left.
The front door clicked shut, leaving Donovan and Ash alone in the bar.
Donovan was still waiting for that next rollercoaster hill. It was going to be a killer when it finally came, and he suspected Ash was here to push him over the edge. “So… the fire was arson?”
Ash paced a few steps, his hands bladed on his hips. “Yeah. Someone doused the back of the barn in accelerant and struck a match.”
“At the risk of sounding like Zak—I told you so.” But he couldn’t find any joy in being right. “There was someone in the barn with me that night.”
Ash parted his lips to protest, but Donovan held up a hand, stopping him.
“And it wasn’t Tiago coming to my rescue. I don’t know why he lied, but I saved myself, and Sasha didn’t know him. We saw him out to dinner the other night, and she didn’t recognize him as one of the firefighters she flagged down. You need to talk to him again because his story isn’t adding up.”
Ash growled and continued pacing. “Don’t tell me how to do my job.” After several minutes dragged by in silence, he stopped moving, took a deep breath, then finally met Donovan’s gaze. “I need you to come in for questioning regarding Darcy.”
There it was—the second rollercoaster drop. And this hill catapulted him straight into his worst nightmare. “Are you arresting me?”
“If I were going to arrest you, you’d be in cuffs already. This is just a routine follow-up.”
“Routine, my ass.” He thought of the chicken teriyaki rice bowl he’d asked Rose to store in the fridge under the bar. He was already running late to take it to Sasha for lunch. “Does it have to be right now?”
“No, but I’d appreciate it if you could make an appointment with my secretary within the next two days.” Ash dug a card out of his wallet and held it out. “The number’s on there.”
He didn’t make a move to accept the card. “Okay.”
Ash exhaled hard in exasperation. “I shouldn’t have to tell you how urgent this is, Van. With that podcast stirring up the public, we need to get ahead of the press on this, and the only way to do that is if you talk to me.”
“I understand.”
Ash held out the card again.
He waved it away. “I don’t need it. Give me an hour, and I’ll come in. I want to get this over with.
Ash studied him with narrowed eyes for several moments. Finally, he gave a curt nod. “One hour. Please don’t do anything stupid like skip town.”
Donovan breathed a sigh of relief. “I’m not going anywhere. I loved Darcy. It was a stupid, toxic, teenage kind of love, but she was my first everything, and I still care about her. I want to know what happened to her more than anyone.”
Ash’s expression softened. “I know you do. But, speaking as your friend and not the sheriff, I have to warn you that things are about to get ugly.”
“I know.”
“One hour, Van.”
“I’ll be there.” He watched Ash leave, his mind racing. Unlike Sheriff Jerry Tennison, Ash had to know he was innocent, so why did agreeing to the interview feel like a step toward the gallows?
Fuck.
He had to go to Sasha, tell her what was happening, and prepare her for the worst. And he should probably contact a lawyer. He never called one when he was interviewed as a dumb eighteen-year-old—a mistake he didn’t plan to make a second time.
He had a lot to do in only an hour.
Since Rose was still in her office, he stepped behind the bar himself to retrieve Sasha’s lunch. When he straightened from the fridge, he found himself face-to-face with a ghostly pale woman. She had huge dark eyes and hollow cheeks—a walking personification of the word haunted. He stumbled back a step in shock before his busted mind realized it wasn’t actually a ghost or another goddamn hallucination.
“Veronica.” Her name left him on a hard exhale of relief. “Jesus. Warn a guy before you go sneaking around.”
A bit of color returned to her cheeks. “Sorry.”
Veronica Martens was an agoraphobic mess of a human, but she had ventured out of her comfort zone to join Redwood Coast Rescue’s K9 unit, which he had to give her credit for. Given what she’d survived, it was brave of her even to try. But in the end, it proved to be too much, and she retreated back to her home, emerging only for their group therapy sessions. Really, it was amazing she’d set foot in the Mad Dog at all—even if it was only for therapy while the pub was closed.
“I thought you left.” He hadn’t seen her since Rose interrupted the session and assumed she’d crept out of the back to avoid all the drama.
“I was going to, but…” She hesitated and hunched in on herself.
“Are you okay?” He started to reach for her shoulder, remembering a half-second too late that it was the wrong move to make.
She flinched back. “Sorry. I should go.” Pulling up the hood of her sweatshirt, she nearly sprinted toward the door.
He hurried around the bar to catch her. “Vee, wait.”
To his surprise, she did stop. She drew a breath that shook her thin shoulders, then slowly turned back to him. “I should’ve mentioned something sooner, but I wasn’t sure it was my place. Before she died, Chrissy told me something about—” She broke off and glanced nervously around. She reminded him of a rabbit, constantly searching for threats, ready to run at the first hint of one.
He shook his head, not understanding where she was going with this. “Hang on, you mean Chrissy Jimenez? Our Chrissy from group.”
“Yes. She was the closest thing I had to a friend.” Veronica bit down on her trembling lower lip, then drew another deep, fortifying breath. “Right before she died, she was… you know, working the steps. She was trying so hard to get clean, and she was on number nine—making amends to people she’d wronged. One of those people, she said, was you.”
“But she never wronged me.”
“She said you didn’t know about it.” Her gaze lifted briefly to the blank television, and suddenly, he understood.
He sank down onto one of the bar stools, stunned. “Chrissy was at the party on Hidden Beach.”
Veronica nodded.
“Holy shit.” He hadn’t known Chrissy back then. She’d been new in town, having transferred to Redwood Coast High School just the month before. He didn’t meet her until much later, after they’d both returned home broken from their military experiences. “She knew something about what happened to Darcy. That’s why she thought she had to make amends.”
Another nod.
He jumped off the stool so fast it tipped over. “Did she tell you what she saw?”
“I’m sorry.” Veronica shook her head and retreated to the door. “I don’t know what good this information does now, but Chrissy was deeply sorry for hurting you by not speaking up back then. I just thought you should know.”
chapter eighteen
“This is really good,” Sasha said and took another bite of the teriyaki bowl. “Like, Michelin-starred restaurant good. Where did you learn to cook?”
Donovan raised a shoulder in a half-hearted shrug. “Mostly Mom. She loved her kitchen.”
She speared a piece of broccoli. “That was one of the first things Anna said to me after the fire—how much she’d loved her kitchen. I’ve never had an attachment to mine, but if you keep cooking meals like this in it, I might—” She broke off and poked him with the handle of her fork. “Earth to Donovan.”
“Sorry.” He put the lid back on his bowl and returned it to the bag. As much as he loved their lunches together, his stomach was too tied up in knots to eat.
Her smile faded. “What’s wrong?”
All right. No putting it off any longer. “Ash wants me to go in for questioning regarding Darcy.”
Sasha sucked in a deep breath, then pushed back her shoulders like she was preparing for a fight. “We knew this was coming.”
“There’s more.”
“That sounds ominous.”
“I was over at the Mad Dog for group when Ash came in to request an interview. After he left, Veronica approached me and said something that...” He trailed off because he still couldn’t wrap his mind around it.
“Okay, Donovan. Now you’re scaring me.”
“Sorry, angel. I don’t mean to. The news just knocked me for a loop and I’m still processing it.”
“News about Darcy?”
“And Chrissy Jimenez.”
“What?”
“Chrissy was at the party that night. I think she witnessed what happened to Darcy, but she was too afraid to say anything at the time. She was going to, though. That’s what Veronica told me. Chrissy was at the making amends part of the 12-step program and she was going to come forward.”
“And then she died.”
He nodded. “All this time, we’ve been thinking it was a tragic accident. That her addiction got the best of her. But her death is too convenient to be a coincidence.”
Sasha’s eyes widened, and she set down her fork with a clatter. “Donovan, this is huge. Are you saying that someone killed Chrissy to keep her from talking about what she saw?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “But it’s a possibility. And now Ash wants me to come in for questioning about it all. Do I tell him all this? I don’t have any evidence other than Veronica’s hear-say. Can I trust him to look into this?”
“Ash is a good man, and I know he’ll listen. But,” she added after a beat, “I also know you think my opinion is clouded by the crush I had on him. So, what does your intuition say?”
Donovan turned his gaze inward and took stock. His intuition told him that Ash was a good cop, but it also said there was something deeply wrong with the whole situation. The web of lies surrounding Darcy’s—and now Chrissy’s—deaths kept getting more tangled and he was starting to suspect a cover-up.
“I don’t know,” he said, shaking his head. “I want to believe that Ash is on the level, that he’ll do the right thing. But I can’t take any chances. This is too important and it’s all too murky, too... complicated. Ash does not like gray areas.”
And he couldn’t bring himself to trust Ash completely—not when the stakes were this high. He needed to find proof before he could come forward with any of this information. “I feel like we’re missing something big, something important.
“So, what are you going to do?”
“I don’t know yet,” Donovan said. “But I do know one thing. I need to find out what happened to Chrissy. If she was killed because she was going to talk, then we need to find out who did it—because that person will clear me of Darcy’s murder.”
